Necessary Measures
"You should go sometime."
Hill froze, but kept her face blank. "Where?" She asked Coulson, casually.
"Tahiti." Phil said, as if it were the most natural thing. "It's a magical place."
Hill mustered up a smile. "Three days in, I'd be begging for an assignment."
"Exactly."
And without another word, the recently-dead agent walked off.
Dr. Straiten beside her watched him go. "Tahiti." He murmured, and Hill heard the tension in his voice. "He really doesn't know, does he."
Hill swallowed. "He can never know." She said.
Part of me wishes I didn't...
"How was the drive from Istanbul?" The canned voice asked from the cliff.
"Rocky as hell." Hill stood, arms crossed, staring irritably up at the camera just to the left of the blast doors. Fury and his secret bases. There had to be sixteen different scanners looking her over from this spot; the latest in tech analyzing her voice, DNA, irises, body language... and they still relied on passwords?
"Countersign recognized." The doors slid open with a click. "Proceed, Assistant Director Hill"
Hill nodded and passed through the doors into the elevator. As it started to descend, she let out a hard breath through her nose. Seriously. She had dropped three separate committee meetings and delegated five different crucial operations onto sub-par personnel just to get here. She'd played tag-team hopscotch across three airbases, ditching the last plane in mid-flight to land on a cloaked Quinjet that could take her here, entirely undetected.
All on Fury's say-so. No information, no explanation, just... "I need you here. Blackout conditions."
So sure! Drop everything! Waste a whole day at the drop of a hat to visit the Director's latest hidey-hole! She didn't have anything better to do, after all. Not like she was helping to clean up and analyze the equivalent of a Roswell-at-Pearl-Harbor situation! Not like they were horribly understaffed and...
Hill pinched her nose. Fury knew how busy they were. Fury probably knew better than she did. Fury generally knew better than most people, which was his most infuriating trait and also the reason she HAD dropped all her work and flown out on his say-so. Not just because he was her boss, but because the man's instincts were seldom wrong.
She stepped out of the elevator and found herself in glass airlock.
"One moment, director Hill." The armed guard on the other side of the glass said, consulting his pad.
Hill crossed her arms and waited.
"All right." The door opened with a chime. "Welcome to the Guest House."
Guest House. Hill filed that information away. "Where's Fury?" Hill said, stepping through the door. Her eyes took in everything, the equipment, the gas canisters, the detonators strapped to the supports.
"He's in Collection." The guard nodded toward a hallway. "Last door on the left. They're prepping for the procedure now."
It was worse than useless to ask the guard what the hell this place was, or what "procedure" they were supposedly prepping for. So she just gave a curt nod and passed toward the hallway the guard had indicated. Better to give the impression that she knew all about it already. Fury would doubtless explain everything.
Or a few things, anyway. Hopefully something.
"Collection" turned out to be a nondescript metal door, marked with biohazard warning and another of SHIELD's ridiculous acronyms. The door looked harmless enough, but Hill's practiced eye picked out both its unusual thickness and the synaptic touch lock built into its surface. Anyone touching the door would have their DNA and fingerprints automatically analyzed. Hill wasn't sure it would work for her, but it clicked open easily enough when she placed her palm flat on the metal. Apparently someone had already entered her into the system.
Fury was inside, next to a metal table piled high with tubes and blue vials. He was talking with a dark-skinned man in a hospital gown. Hill recognized Dr. Straiten—one of SHIELD's foremost surgeons. Another mystery—he was supposed to be helping to dissect Chitauri corpses in...
...Hill's mind went back to the acronym on the door, and she suppressed a groan. TAHITI? Really? Somedays she wondered if the acronyms were just Fury's own little idea of fun.
"Medically, yes, but you don't understand." Dr. Straiten was insisting. "Physically, everything's fine, but beyond that... The trauma was simply too great, there are certain things the mind will not..."
"It's being taken care of, doctor." Fury interrupted the man in his calm, no-nonsense voice. "Dr. Goodman will be leading the next procedure, but I'd like you to be on hand to advise."
"Another surgery won't..."
"Hill." Fury glanced over. "Glad you could make it. Dr. Straiten here was just giving me a quick update." He gave Straiten a curt nod, clearly dismissing the man.
Straiten seemed to swell up, and then deflated. "Yes, director." He sighed, walking off.
"Enjoying the facility, Hill?" Fury said, as the doctor left. "Old Nazi bunker. Probably meant as another safe-house—Colonel Phillips found the map to it at Hitler's place in Brazil, and like everything else associated with the assassination, buried it."
"Really, sir." Hill still didn't understand why they kept up the "Hitler's suicide" story. She supposed by this point, it was simply less trouble than re-writing all the history books. At the moment, though, history wasn't what was bothering her. "You wanted me here, sir?"
"Yes." Fury nodded. "Project TAHITI is entering a key phase in development. It's important you be on hand to observe."
"Very good, sir." Hill wanted to scream and just tell the man to cut the obscure enigmatic bullshit, for him to just TELL her already what was going on... but she knew all too well it would be useless. Fury, for all his prgamatism, had an undeniably dramatic flair, and as his subordinate, she'd learned just to deal with it. Usually, by moving on to a new subject. "Sir... the guard at the front called this 'the Guest House...' Is that another metaphor, or..." she let the sentence trail off into a question.
Fury, who was studying the racks of vials, looked at her. "No, it's not a metaphor, Hill." He touched a button, and a tube extended out of the wall. "The Guest House is where we put The Guest."
Hill considered herself a stoic individual. In her long service in SHIELD (and in the CIA before that, and Green Berets before that...), she'd seen and done a lot that would make most men blench in terror. But even she could restrain a slight intake of breath at the sight of the giant blue-purple alien floating in the tube. "The Guest..." she murmured, stepping closer.
Until now, it had been a virtual myth, a short classified conversation that she'd had with Fury shortly after taking the Assistant Director position. She hadn't even been certain how much of it to credit at the time, but she'd seen further signs-slight allusions and assumptions in mission statements. Funding discrepancies on "fringe" projects. Barely there, even if you knew what to look for.
The Guest. The entire reason the SSR had become SHIELD, and gained so much power and influence.
"Carter recommissioned this facility after the Whitehall operation." Fury said, stepping around her, his own eye studying the corpse. "ET here has been a resident ever since."
"What is it?" Hill asked, her eyes raking up and down the alien's oddly human-like anatomy. There were some signs of decay, but not much, given how old the corpse was. Everything below the torso was missing, allowing her to glimpse the significant musculature and dense bone—clearly super-strong, probably super-durable too.
"No idea." Fury shook his head. "Doesn't look at all like our blonde friend with the hammer, though, does it? Dr. Selvig mentioned Ice Giants, but Coulson—" Hill felt a distant stab at the name, "—in his report said Thor described those as having red eyes. Could be a bilgesnipe, for all we know." He shook his head again. "The universe gets bigger, but we don't seem to learn anything more."
"You're drawing blood." Hill observed, noting the tubes shoved into the alien's torso.
"Among other things." Fury nodded. "Degeneration set in ten years ago. Only so much cyrogenics and nutrient baths can keep in check. I made the call to extract everything we could while it was still good."
"Good?" Hill questioned, looking at her superior. Good for what?
Fury slid the tube back into the wall without another word. "If the Asgardians are typical of the sort of playmates we can expect to see," he said, moving toward the door, "then that makes us the near-sighted athsmatic kid with brittle bones and a cello on the playground."
Hill's forehead wrinkled. The director's penchant for metaphor occasionally eluded her. "Sir?"
"The fresh meat." Fury clarified, opening the door and waking out. Hill followed him. "The new kid. The runt. The straggler in the herd. Belgium. Ethiopia. That's us. The one everyone loves to pick on. We left an impression on the Chitauri, but individually, they're capable of things our soldiers can't even dream of. If it wasn't for the Avengers, we'd have had no way of keeping them back."
"Yes sir." Hill nodded. It was the logical conclusion of every analysis they'd conducted, and it was the main topic of half the comittee meetings she'd been holding. How do we stop this from happening again? And what if we can't?
Fury paced down the hallway, leather coat billowing behind him. "We need every edge we can get, anything that we can pull from our enemy."
"Even blood." Hill nodded, beginning to understand.
"Even blood." Fury agreed, opening up another door marked "Observation Deck." There was a set of stairs leading up. "Things are moving fast now, Hill. They're only going to get faster. We need to be prepared for anything. War, betrayal, terror... People are going to die, Hill. Good people. People we can't afford to lose."
"People already have." Hill said, mostly to herself as she climbed the steps after him. Damnit, Phil. You would the type to rush in and get yourself killed, saving an alien, no less. Fury was right. They were going to have more of that in the days to come. Better to steel yourself, so that you didn't even feel the death of close, trusted friends.
"We need to find out how to bring them back." Fury said.
Before Hill could ask exactly what he meant by that, Fury swung open a door and the two of them entered the observation deck. There were a few doctors there already, milling anxiously around the wall-length windows looking down at the surgery room below. Hill recognized all of them—two were respected specialists in their field, the third was a discredited scientist who had released a controversial study last year, and the last had been officially dead for three years.
The scientists barely looked up as they entered. Fury walked up to the glass and looked down, almost casually. Hill followed suit and glanced down
There, on the operating table, surrounded by four or five doctors in blue scrubs, was the late Agent Coulson, eyes wide, nostrils flaring, mouth open in what Hill could only imagine was a scream. If she listened, she could almost hear it through the glass.
Apparently for Fury, that wasn't enough. "Can we get audio?" He asked the room at large.
The scientists looked up at this, and Hill took in their faces—grey, exhausted, horrified. "We... we can." Volunteered the officially-dead one. Down below, Coulson seemed to have stopped screaming, but his mouth was trembling. "We turned it off... the things he was saying..."
"Turn it back on." Fury said
The scientist paled, but she obediently flipped the switch. Words flooded into the room. "...die... please, let me... let me die... PLEASE!"
Hill had once read a report from a Hong Kong operation. They'd taken out a Triad cell, and in one of the torture chambers, they'd found Agent Coulson. He'd been missing for two months. Per official SHIELD policy, he'd been marked MIA and all operations he'd been privy to were marked as compromised. The assault team hadn't even known he was there. It was blind chance.
The Triads knew torture. They'd been doing it for centuries. They'd taken the best tricks from the Gestapo and refined them. Hot needles under the fingernails, water drips, audio dissonance, that sort of thing. Yet all the reports of Coulson said the same. They'd never touched him. He kept reciting the same list of names, over and over.
...Guarnere... Compton... Jones... Sousa... Dugan... Barnes...
And so on. The entire roster of the 107th battalion, the one Captain America had rescued from Hydra headquarters. In order of birthdate. Whenever he got to the end, he would just jump back to Geraltson, the WWI vet who'd come back for more, and go through the list again, until he was down to Pevensie, the 16-year-old who'd lied about his age.
He hadn't told the Triad a single thing. The pain hadn't even touched him.
And now he was whimpering for the doctors below to end his life.
The doctors were talking. "...no nerve endings in the brain, he shouldn't be feeling a thing..."
"...perhaps pain is more physiological than tangible. The trauma of memories being re-written..."
"...no anasthetic?"
"...need to do it as new memories are being formed, once they're stored in the hippocampus it's much harder to..."
"Stimulating his mind to recall the events being..."
They flowed around her, on the edge of her consciousness. All she could see was the man on the operating table, the exposed pulp of his brain, the horrible clicking robot poking at it.
And Fury, standing beside her, cold, implacable, watching as one of his best friends screamed for mercy.
"Terrestrialized Alien Host Integrative Tissue Initiative." He said, after a few moments.
Hill blinked. "What?"
"TAHITI. Terrestrialized Alien Host Integrative Tissue Initiative." He said. "We discovered that a compound from the Guest, GH-325, stimulates regenerative muscle and tissue growth. We turn back the boat of Charon and raise the dead." He shrugged. "Only problem is, the process tends to drive the subject insane."
"I... see." Hill distantly wondered who the cold-hearted bastard who'd overseen these 'experiments' must have been.
"Best solution we've found is to directly overwrite memories, using the MOM." Fury gestured to the robot. "Memory Overwrite Machine." He grimaced. "Not the cleverest name."
Coulson let loose a piercing scream. One of the scientists reached for the knob, but Fury gave him a look.
"And that... works?" Hill forced herself to stay focused. This was a huge development. A major strategic advantage.
Fury shrugged. "Work in progress. Had some setbacks. Coulson is the first we've brought back who was actually medically dead."
"I see." Hill said, but she didn't. And she had to know. "Why?"
"To bring back people we can't afford to lose." Fury said. "People who will do the things we can't."
The Avengers. Of course this was about the Avengers. Wasn't everything, when it came to Fury? "Why... choose Coulson?"
"Not a choice." Fury shook his head. "Orders from higher up."
Hill glanced sharply at this. Fury didn't take orders from higher up. Not from anyone except the WSC, and he didn't listen to them half the time. And he didn't follow a single order he disagreed with.
Fury saw her look, and gave a single shake of his head. "I buried that information with Coulson." He said. "All you need to know is: this was necessary."
"Sir." Hill just gave a curt nod, and turned back to study Coulson's shaking corpse.
It made sense, she told herself, as Coulson's pleas faded into the background. In some ways, it made MORE sense than Fury's Avengers Initiative—one of the weak points in that plan had always been what happened if one of them died. Hell, if Thor had died in the battle they could've had an intergalactic war on their hands. No, Fury was right. TAHITI was necessary. Perhaps even Coulson's pain was necessary.
And it was necessary to tell her, of course, to show her this, so that if Fury died, she would know what to do. But a part of her wondered. Would I do this to Fury? She wondered. If he died, would I bring him back? Would he want me to?
But that wasn't what really unnerved Hill. What unnerved Hill, as she stood there beside the Director, watching a fellow Agent scream and beg for death, was the question:
Would Fury do this to me?
A/N: This has been in planning since I started the series, basically, but I wasn't sure how to do it-how much Hill should know already and how much Fury should be revealing. I finally decided she would know about the Guest, but not about Tahiti. It's not important for her to know about Tahiti, but (in my head canon) the Guest is the whole reason SHIELD exists, the thing that galvanized nations the world over into forming and funding a massive organization. You need a united threat to bring people together like that-aliens are the only ones that make sense.
The Hitler line was a throwaway gag. Apparently, in the comics, Bucky WAS the guy who killed Hitler, so there's some precedent there.
